Indoctrination Success!

With JJ's permission, I am posting the email I received from her last evening...

"...I just wanted to tell you how much I'm LOVING knitting!! I finished the bottom of my bag and got to the pick up and knit part and almost stopped. But instead I googled how to do it. And now that I think I know what I'm doing- I don't want to put it down!! Its like reading a good book! Except I have to be up at 6. So I have to!

That is all. Wish I was there!!


My work as a knitting mentor may be done!

By the way, the wonderfully addicting bag mentioned is the Medano Beach Bag by Heidi Kirrmaier.

It does look like a great bag, JJ! Post a pic of the finished product when you complete it...tonight??

love, marmie

Remnants and Future Projects

All I really want to do right now is bust out my new size 2.5 dpn and start knitting Nephew Josh's birthday present. However, I am still packing for my cross country trip. I am moving back to the East Coast after a whirlwind year in LA. I am unsure of my future there but I am, for the first time in awhile, looking forward to the unknown. If knitting has taught me anything about life it is that you might have a plan and a pattern to follow but the end product can still turn out different than you expected. (P.S. Thanks to Marmie and JJ for showing just how true this is!)

A few weeks ago JJ flew out to visit me and left me with a few knitting remnants. She brought me her adorable pink octopus, which has been my moving mascot. She also spent some time knitting while I was at work and I came home to her own knit eyeball. I guess the eyeball fad has stuck! I love that because of this project, we three women are leaving knitting remnants of ourselves wherever we go. :-)

So while I pack and tape and label boxes I keep eying the bag of orange, black, and white yarn that will soon be a cute little fox. I decided to listen to Stereomood.com, a music website JJ got me into recently. As I was browsing the possible "moods" of music to listen to I discovered there is one called "Let's Knit!" The knitting gods are on my side. I may not be putting together my latest project, but I am in the knitting zone, stitching together my west coast life which will soon turn into an east coast life.

Cheers, fellow Howe women, to our future as knitters, to our east coast stitch n' bitch dates, and to the hobby that has guided us through an amazing 7 months so far!

sometimes you knit...

Sometimes you knit out of obligation...


Sometimes you knit to learn something...

And sometimes you knit out of pure love...

In every stitch, little Alice!

love,

grand-marmie

The "G" Word

This is a big apology to my fellow Howe girl knitters! When we started on this knitting venture, I failed to teach you a very important lesson - always check your gauge!

Having said that, I admit that I used to be quite neglectful in this area. I always assumed that if I had the needles and yarn indicated in the pattern, that all would come out right. A collection of misfit outfits taught me different.

Unfortunately, I failed to stress this need enough to miss maggie and jj. For our toymaker, maggie, it hasn't really been an issue. Poor jj came face to face with it with our latest project - the Ballet Tee by Teva Durham.

http://http//www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/ballet-t-shirt

I thought that I would knit this little tee the same time as jj - that way, if she had any questions I would be ready to jump in and offer assistance. I knit up my gauge sample and jumped into the project. It's a fun little tee to wear over a cami and is cool and comfy. Here is the final project:

Cute, right? I did add a couple of inches to the bottom to accomodate my middle-age midrif, but otherwise it went just as written. I actually love this pattern and will be making a couple more to have on hand. (note - I will not be wearing it over a black sports bra as miss jj is modeling here)

JJ, meanwhile, knit away on her piece. As mentioned previously, there was no gauge check - just a lot of fun knitting. Same size needles, same yarn...different result. Take a look:

Still absolutely adorable on jj, but definitely a different look! What you can't see in the photo is how she stretched this little tee over her teeny body!

Just to make the point more clearly:

Gauge - it's a pain in the ass, but it has it's purpose!

Two fabulous tops, one interesting lesson on gauge.

love, marmie

failing seems to be in the water....

so before i start my own tale of fail, i would like to comment on megs last post. as i was sitting enjoying a good ole 'merican beer on the fourth o july, i got the notification that meg had posted. being a good sister and faithful blog follower, i read it right away. and i loved the chick! and i thought was a better way than to prove that it was indeed a chick then to ask everyone i was with what they thought! so without telling them what it was supposed to be, i passed around my phone. everyone was on the chick bandwagon until my dear sweet bf. and ill admit, i was shocked at his response. "its a monkey." wtf. for real? but then he explained it. and i got it. maybe it was the overabundance of 'merican beer, but this is what he, and now i, see.....

(smile added by moi)

get it?

anyways, moving on to my own fail. so for my birthday my mom got a goody bag from The Embraceable Ewe Yarn Shop. Inside was the perfect knitting gift: 3 skeins of light blue yarn, a set of bamboo circular needles and Teva Durham's Ballet T-Shirt pattern. i was very excited and set about winding the yarn- which is a fail i have already blogged about- i think - if not imagine someone w too much yarn and not enough wine. anyways. mom finally wound it up for me at home and i was sent back to dc to knit. however, the first time i read the pattern i decided i had no idea what they were talking about and set it out of my mind. but after finishing that lil pink octo, i decided i could take anything on and decided that the long weekend would be a great time to start!

so i set off on my sweater. and just like mom said, it wasnt that hard. and i was feeling pretty stoked.
see, i figured out that when it says pm i dont have to run out to the store to get markers, i can just make em out of my extra yarn!


and when it says to count rows, there's really no need for a row counter. its totally easier to just write all over your pattern! (i know what youre thinking, what do you do it you want to knit this pattern again?? havent figured that part out yet.)

my biggest problem was knitting the sleeve. i figured out the whole casting on extra stitches on a row, but my arm hole was a little effed up, which hopefully is easily fixable. but here was the problem. it was about this point, 3 nights worth of knitting i believe, that i realized my sweater was the wrong size. i was knitting a cute cap sleeve ballet t for a 5 year old. thank god steve-o just had a baby girl! well that was a sad realization, but instead of tearing the shirt apart, i decided it would be worth it to just finish it up and make sure that next time i wont have as many mistakes....

that line going vertically is supposed to be in the center of the shirt. however, i didnt read the directions completely before starting and missed the whole bit about placing markers in the middle of the front and back on your very first row. oops.

the underneath of this sleeve wasnt that bad. however the increases are supposed to line up differently.

and this ones just a fail all the way around.

so im excited that i finally made something wearable, but it kinda sucks that its only for a small child. but i guess we're all here to learn, right? and the upside is that marm bought enough yarn that i can make another one. although im afraid that my mistake was not being able to knit to the correct gauge. which means everything piece of clothing i make will be child sized. haha. so stay tuned for my howekidsknit etsy shop!

Knitting Fail!

My confidence in knitting, and in life as well, has seemed to risen steadily in the last month. I have learned new techniques, such as knitting in the round, a few new ways to increase and decrease, and how to incorporate crochet into my projects.

However, the world will never let you gain too much confidence before it reminds you that, in fact, you aren't all that.

The last week of school was a strange week in my life, to be sure. I found myself trying to get paperwork done, trying to finish report cards, trying to secure a job back on the East Coast, and trying to knit eyeballs. It was a very good thing that I rallied Marmie in to help me knit those suckers because even with my "report card, eyeball, report card, eyeball" rotation, I found myself knitting those suckers at a pace that was not quite fast enough.

I pulled my first all-nighter since college and finished knitting the last eyeball at 6 am, the morning of the last day of school. I finished filling them during recess and then at the end of the day, surprised the kids with a truly unique end of the year gift! We had a tearful goodbye but it was comforted with 22 happy kids with 22 amazing eyeballs! Just see for yourself!After completing a project like that, successfully pulling an all-nighter, and getting a great job back in Boston, how could I not be a little excessive on the hubris? I could conquer the world! So this week I sat down to "just knit something." This whole project started when I had requested that my mom knit a little chick as a gift for me and she commented that she was not teaching me to fish. So I thought what better project to rock right now then my own little chick! This would show that I could in fact knit whatever I wanted and it would turn out pretty damn awesome.

Ha. Enter hubris' good friend humility. I was feeling confident as I knit in the round because it was so much easier. However, this little guy, whose pattern I found on Ravelry.com, needed a little more skill than I was able to render.

Example 1: The tail. Not sure what is going on there but it looks more like I fastened a knitted rudder to his behind, even attaching it a little off-center. My chick will now swim in circles.

Example 2: The head. What do you mean 1/3 of the way down the body to make the head?? If that is the case then the beak will be ginormous! Which brings me to...

Example 3: The beak. I don't know how the suggested pattern for the beak was ever expected to work but when I tried to attach it, my chick ended up looking more like Steve Martin in the movie Roxanne. So I attempted to make a smaller one, reducing the stitches. Fail. Tried using a different size needle. Fail. Thought about just attaching a construction paper beak but couldn't bring myself to do it.

What I have is a reminder from life. No, I cannot do everything perfectly. My chick looks weird. In fact, when I had company over recently I hid him away in a basket instead of proudly displaying him on the side table where all my clever creatures have resided before being sent off to their owners. Yes life, I remember. I'm still learning.

anything you can do i can do better...havent we already heard this song?

so i love my big sister to bits and pieces. but we've always been a bit competitive, and by we, i mean me. as the little sister i always tried to do everything that my big sis did, however, usually not with my desired outcome. so when lil milla made an octopus for my soon-to-be-named-cutest-baby-in-the-world, i got a bit jealous. my pink tutu was just not enough. i needed to do something. so i decided to completely copy what she made - except in pink! win! (this was my glorious vision....)


so i started knitting up my little pink octo. i think i may have gone 3 stitches before i got completely confused and had to call big sis to ask some questions. in the short time since mom had taught us how to knit in the round, i had completely forgotten. so this was the shiznit that i ended up w...
its all twisted about, nothing making any sense, and the more i tried to get this to work, the more frustrated i got. so i called big sis AGAIN. poor girl really needs to get verizon. after about an hour, a glass of wine, and having to rewind bridehead revisted about 15 times, i finally figured out how to get this started...
after getting more wine, i was excited that i figured out how to knit in the round. the only problem now- going on hour 2 - was that i cant read directions. i was increasing after every single stitch, every single row, instead of changing when i increase on each row. so im not sure what i ended up with after 2 hours, but it was nothing close to what it was supposed to look like, so i had to start over AGAIN. woo hoo. but this time i was much more successful, subjectively. ha. i could see the shape starting, as shown in the pics below, but the further i got along in the process, the more i realized i was making a balloon. thats right. instead of an octo head, i made a child's party balloon. win again.



after successfully making a balloon, i decided to call it a night. octo legs could wait till another night.

the next night to be exact! now i need to preface this with some admitting that i do have some faults- few, but some. and one of those is that i forgot how to crochet when i was 12 years old. as most tweens, i exhausted myself with this skill after making 10 million friendship bracelets. meg told me it was easy and to just google it. my other fault? not owning a computer- that works. so i googled on my super brilliant blackberry. win. i was able to get the gist of the curly cue, the stupid curly cue that looked like nothing (dont worry, pic to follow). so again, meg bailed me out and i was able to perfect 8 little legs.

what is that? really?

so anyways, my journey with my little pink octo was almost complete. just needed to stuff the little guy, attach the legs, and go on my merry way. so now, i would like to introduce you to my brand new little pink octo......

and here she is with my soon-to-be-named-cutest-baby-in-the-world's homemade tutu

so in the end i think i will admit defeat to my big sis. her lil green octo def beats my lil pink octo. but, i learned a lot and now need to get a cat to give my octo to.

next up? learning to knit with circular needles. here's a hint: i already hate it!